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Police officers should be paid until proven guilty

Police officers charged with certain criminal offences should be suspended. But the presumption of innocence should protect their right to make a living.

Despite being convicted of attempted murder, Const. James Forcillo continues to be paid while he fights the verdict. (Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Reid Rusonik

Thu., Feb. 4, 2016

When a police officer is charged with a criminal offence, in most cases he or she is suspended from duty. That is as it should be. Recent calls to suspend such officers without pay, however, may be misguided.

Firing someone because he or she has been charged with a criminal offence violates the presumption of innocence and should be illegal, not simply civilly actionable. The presumption must protect one’s right to make a living. Having your liberty until your innocence can be confirmed in a trial isn’t worth much if you lose your home and cannot put food on the table in the interim.

Still, it is the nature of some jobs that they cannot be continued to be performed by someone facing many types of criminal charges. The people served by such employees need to be absolutely certain that the employees’ characters are above disrepute. Police officers, of course, are such employees.

But police officers are also uniquely vulnerable to being the subject of a wide range of false criminal complaints precisely because of their work. They police many individuals of questionable character, who are not above making false complaints. They do a job where they are much more likely to work in situations where their conduct will be subject to criminal investigation. If they stand to lose their incomes if they are simply charged with an offence, they will shy away from precisely the individuals who need to be policed and the situations where policing is needed.

But what about the police officers who are found guilty of the offences with which they are charged? What about those officers who it is fairly determined wrongly benefitted from a presumption of innocence in terms of their character? What about those officers who if their trials could have taken place the day after being charged would have been dismissed as officers the very next day?

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Critics point to the case of Toronto police officer James Forcillo, who was convicted of attempted murder last month in the death of Sammy Yatim, and who continues to be paid while he fights the verdict. In response to this and a host of other recent cases, there has been a widespread call to change the legislation requiring automatically paying such officers properly suspended from active duty. There has been a particular suggestion to give their chiefs the discretion whether or not to continue to pay them.

It would make a mockery of the presumption of innocence to empower anyone with such discretion. It’s a presumption that can be taken away only after a fair trial. The prospect of such discretion being employed arbitrarily is too real for it ever to rival the fairness of a properly conducted trial. Police officers should know they have nothing to fear in terms of losing their livelihoods if they behave legally because their livelihoods will be protected by their right to a fair trial, not by being on the good side of their boss or dependent on having a boss who has the courage not to sacrifice them because of improperly informed public pressure.

There is a much better way to ensure that police officers who are convicted of offences that disentitle them to be officers aren’t paid by the taxpayer long after committing their crimes. Their salaries should continue to be paid until their trials, but into an interest-bearing trust account that they can only access upon their acquittals. If they are convicted of offences that lead to their dismissal as officers, the money in trust is forfeited. In short, the guilty would stop being remunerated.

The province should loan any officer interest-free whatever they wish out of this trust account — taking proper security against the repayment of the loan — so the police officers’ livings are not impaired. In this way innocent officers will not miss a beat in their remuneration while the guilty ones will not benefit from our desire to protect the innocent.

The police are always claiming the problems with the current state of policing are the result of only “a few bad apples.” It would be wrong to try to address this problem by punishing many presumed and actually innocent police officers because of a relatively small number of guilty ones.

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